Know when to hold ‘em

Matt Tyson knows he won’t be playing in a Super Bowl anytime soon.

And, despite his last name, he won’t find himself in a boxing ring contending for the heavyweight championship.

But the 20-year-old Lynnwood resident could one day be seated next to the world’s best poker players, vying for the game’s ultimate reward: cash, and lots of it.

That’s the allure that has turned this ancient game into a craze.

Casinos are scrambling to open, expand or reopen their poker rooms and get the cards flying.

POKER GLOSSARY All-in: When a player bets all of his or her chips. Bet: Put money in the pot. Big slick: Slang for ace-King hole cards; a very strong starting hand. Blind or blind bet: A mandatory bet placed by the two players to the left of the dealer button. (The one closest to the dealer button is the “big blind” and the other is the “small blind” because the first bet is bigger than the second. Buy-in: A minimum amount of money that must be paid in order to play in a tournament and live games. Call: To match (rather than raise) the previous bet. Check: To not bet, reserving the option to call or raise later in the betting round. Community cards: The five cards that are placed faceup in the center of the table and can be used by all of the active players. “Dead man’s hand”: A pair of aces and a pair of eights; Wild Bill Hickok was shot holding this hand. Drawing dead: When you cannot win, no matter what cards come up. Flop: The first three community cards placed in the center of the table. Fold: To withdraw from the game and give up your cards rather than continue betting. Flush: A hand made up of cards that are all the same suit, e.g. all hearts. Kicker: The highest card in a hand that is not being used in some other way (to create three-of-a-kind, a pair, etc). Lay down: Folding a strong hand in a critical situation. Nuts: A hand that can’t be beaten no matter what comes. On the button: The best table position in Hold’em, benefiting from acting last. The player who acts last in a round. Pair: Two cards of the same rank. Raise: To make a bet larger than the previous bet, forcing players to either call the difference or fold. River or “Fifth Street”: The final community card dealt. Round of betting: The period in which each active player has the opportunity to check, bet or raise. Royal flush: The best hand in poker, containing: A, K, Q, J, 10 in the same suit. Straight: Five consecutive cards of mixed suits. Straight flush: Five consecutive cards of the same suit. Three-of-a-kind: Three cards of the same rank. Turn or “Fourth Street”: The fourth community card played. SOURCE: World Poker Tour

It’s all in response to people watching the game on TV for nearly two years. They’re convinced they can go face-to-face with its greatest players.

“If you have 10 G’s, you can go to Vegas and play against the best in the world,” Tyson said, referring to the $10,000 buy-in for the annual World Series of Poker.

“This is the only game where you can play against the best in the world if you have the money.”

The game is Texas Hold’em.

“I played poker (before), but I didn’t play Hold’em,” Tyson said. “I didn’t even know Hold’em existed until I started watching it on TV.”

The rules of Texas Hold’em are simple:

Each player is dealt two cards, facedown. Then, five community cards that everyone can use are dealt faceup. Players combine their two cards with the five community cards to make their best possible five-card hand.

The nuance is in the betting.

The ultimate goal is to win the pot.

Most hands aren’t decided by revealing who has the best cards, but by others folding for fear of losing more money.

It sounds simple. It isn’t.

“It’s easy to learn, but it can take a lifetime to master,” said David Schwartz, coordinator of the Gaming Studies Research Center at University of Nevada, Las Vegas.

Huge television ratings get the most credit for the rise in popularity of Texas Hold’em.

“The World Poker Tour” is The Travel Channel’s highest-rated series ever and “The World of Series of Poker” has drawn bigger audiences than “Sportscenter” on ESPN. Fox SportsNet also airs “Late Night Poker” on a regular basis.

The Bravo network has joined in with “Celebrity Poker Showdown,” where a mixed bag of stars including NASCAR champ Jeff Gordon and comedian Kathy Griffin put on their best poker faces.

But it was a small – tiny, actually – twist in the way the game is covered that made all the difference.

Lipstick-size cameras give the audience an edge over the players sitting at the table. By seeing the players’ cards, we know who’s bluffing and which card is needed to complete the winning hand.

“Suddenly, it was really interesting to watch,” said Larry Zeldner, who teaches poker classes at Seattle’s Discover U and the Experimental College run by the Associated Students of the University of Washington. “That’s what’s turned it into a real spectator event.”

That’s why Tyson tunes in.

“You’ve got to watch what the pros do,” he said. “If you watch golf on TV, you’re always watching their swing and how they do things.”

That’s also why Roni Elsberry watches.

“I like to see what (cards) they play,” said the 37-year-old Everett woman who has played in daily tournaments for about six months. “I like the strategy, I guess. I usually make it to the final table.”

Ever since Kenny Rogers sang about “The Gambler,” who drank all his whiskey in exchange for some advice, people have known the basics of poker: Know when to hold ‘em, know when to fold ‘em.

Combine that smooth-talking ace with Old West icons such as Wild Bill Hickok and Doc Holliday and you’ve got the fixin’s for a rebel-hero image that everyone dreams of.

Until a few decades ago, poker was an outlaw’s game.

“The original guys who played this back in the ’50s were really bad cats,” Schwartz said. “You did not want to mess with these guys. They really went out traveling around Texas playing poker. It was a lot of hard living.”

Today, dot-commers, corporate attorneys and Hollywood actors get their chance to stare down anyone seated across from them. For those precious moments, they’re the bullies.

“It’s kind of funny,” Schwartz said. “Now you’ve got people training by playing in the chat rooms online.”

Zeldner sees it as an escape for most people.

“You can sort of control your own destiny in poker a little bit; sometimes that’s harder to do outside in your work life,” he said. “You have to pay income taxes (in real life). In poker, you can kind of put on your own face and image and sort of control your own destiny.”

The Royal Casino on Highway 99 in Everett installed poker tables about a month and a half ago, poker manager Bob Clark said.

“It’s really taken off,” Clark said. “There’s a casino on every corner now and we’re all looking for anything to make some more income.”

The Royal, which has only three poker tables but is planning to expand, holds a no-limit Texas Hold’em tournament at 2 p.m. every day. But that isn’t where the money is for the casino.

The tournament, where people pay a set amount to play and use tournament chips until one person has them all, simply brings people in the door. The hope is that they’ll stick around to play in “live games,” where players use their own money and the casino gets a “rake,” a small percentage of the pot that the house keeps for hosting the game.

The Tulalip Casino is also trying to meet an increasing demand. With 13 tables already in place, the decision was made about six months ago to add eight more, said Port Parks, a shift manager. The new tables are expected by the end of the month.

“They’re getting card rooms all over the place now,” Parks said. “Everybody likes no-limit Hold’em because it’s just like playing on TV. On Friday and Saturday nights, we were filling all the games and our board was totally full and we couldn’t get new games going.”

Like any trend, the poker phenomenon isn’t expected to last forever. But most people agree the game will continue to enjoy a level of popularity that couldn’t have been imagined just a few years ago.

“Even two years ago, it was still kind of in smoky rooms and, of course, the Indian casinos hit Washington state about 12 years ago,” Zeldner said. That was when poker first surfaced in large well-lit places locally, he said.

The simple fact that he’s teaching a college-sponsored class on poker gives Zeldner some cause to pinch himself.

“I had thought of (teaching) before, but I never dreamed it would be so popular that I would have waiting lists no matter how many sections I keep adding,” he said. He’s adding another course focusing on tournament play in the fall, and may teach a class in Hawaii this winter.

“Texas Hold’em is such a pure form of poker,” Zeldner said. “The hands are so close together because everybody’s got the same five cards. You spend a lot of time looking at people. That really makes it interesting, I think.

“It’s going to be around for a while.”

As for the young Tyson, he’ll be around for a while, as well.

“I’ll be playing as long as I’ve got money,” he said. “You can win with any hand, it just takes guts – and hope no one else is playing anything good.”

Reporter Victor Balta: 425-339-3455 or vbalta@ heraldnet.com.